Billy Summers

The weekend Monopoly games continue. Now they draw kids from all over the neighborhood, not just Evergreen Street, everyone vying to dethrone the champ. Billy takes them all to the cleaners. One Saturday, Jamal Ackerman takes a seat at the board, claiming the racecar as his token (‘Come on, White America,’ he says to Billy with a grin). He’s a little tougher than the kids, but not much. After seventy minutes he’s broke and Billy is gloating. It’s Corinne who finally takes him down, on the last Saturday before school reconvenes. All the kids who’ve been kibitzing applaud when Billy declares bankruptcy. So does Billy. Corinne bows, then takes a picture of the board that Billy is careful not to be in. Not that it matters much. This is the age of the cell phone camera, and he’s sure he’s on Derek’s. Probably on Danny Fazio’s, too. The Ackerman kids are looking at Billy with shining eyes as they applaud. These games have become important to Derek and Shanice. To all the kids, but especially to them, because they were there when the Saturday games started. He has become important to them, and he’s going to let them down. He doesn’t believe (or can’t, or refuses to) that he is actually going to break their hearts when he kills Joel Allen, but he knows they will be shocked and shaken. Disillusioned. Dutched. He can tell himself, if not by me then by someone else (and does), but it won’t wash. This is not how a good person behaves. But the situation is inflexible. He more and more hopes Allen will avoid extradition, or be killed in lockup, or even escape, rendering the whole thing moot.

Weekdays he eats on the plaza of the Gerard Tower, if it’s not too hot. He makes it his business to strike up an acquaintance with Colin White, the flashy dresser. White comes across not as a stereotypical gay man but as an actual caricature, a figure of fun out of a 1980s sitcom. He’s all breathy voice and exaggerated gestures and great big ohmygod eyerolls. He calls Billy darling and honeypie. Once Billy gets past that, he discovers a man of great wit. Cutting wit. And when the eyeballs aren’t rolling, they are sharply observant. Later, after the deed is done, there will be many descriptions of David Lockridge. Some, including Phyllis Stanhope’s, will be good, but Billy thinks that this man’s will be the most accurate. He intends to use Colin White, but in the meantime he needs to be careful of him. Billy has the dumb self; he thinks Colin White has a silly fucker self. It takes one to know one.

One day while they’re sitting on a bench in the plaza’s scant noontime shade, Billy asks Colin how he can do his job of cozening people out of a few bucks when he’s basically, face it, a pretty nice guy, not to mention as gay as Aunt Maudie’s Easter hat. Colin puts a hand to the side of his face, gives Billy a wide-eyed ingenue’s stare, and says, ‘Well … I sort of … change.’ The hand drops. The pleasant smile (enhanced by just the barest touch of lip gloss) disappears. So does the lilting delivery. The voice that comes out of wispy Colin White, today dressed in his gold parachute pants and high-collared paisley shirt, is that of a pissed-off lawyer.

‘Ma’am, I don’t know who you’ve been soft-soaping, but I am immune. You’re all out of time. You want to keep your car? Because if I hang up on you without getting something, and I mean more than a promise, my next call is going to be to the repo company we use. Cry all you want, I’m immune to that, too.’ He sounds it. ‘I need sixty bucks on my screen in the next ten minutes. Fifty at the very least, and only because I got up on the right side of the bed this morning.’

He stops, looking at Billy with wide eyes (enhanced by just a trace of liner). ‘Does that help you understand?’

It does. What it doesn’t help Billy to understand is whether Colin White is a good person or a bad one. Perhaps he’s both. Billy has always found this a troubling concept.

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He gets texts from his ‘agent’ on his David Lockridge phone that summer, sometimes once a week, sometimes twice.

GRusso: Your editor hasn’t had a chance to read your latest pages yet.

GRusso: I called your editor but he was out of the office.

GRusso: Your editor is still in California.

And so on. The one he’s waiting for, the one meaning that a California judge has approved Allen’s extradition, will be Your editor wants to publish. When Billy gets that, he’ll begin his final preparations.

Giorgio’s final text will read The check is on the way.

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